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My Favorite Shop
2024

Tour

In his exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Mathias Poledna examines the embodiment and visualization of modernity. His new film is presented in a dialog with other works and the spaces of the institution, reflecting on historicity and the capacity for moments to become history. Poledna’s work also investigates how historicized image economies, documents and objects relate to the present and help to determine it, while at the same time referring to how the study of historiography itself is formed.

The practices of collecting, sorting, categorizing and exhibiting which emerged with the modern era and the European expansions were influential on how the great narratives of modernism and modernity were produced. Like the writing of history, Poledna’s practice is also characterized by a kind of citation, in which objects, items and text forms are torn from their original contexts and arranged in order to tell a particular story. This is precisely what Poledna pursues in this exhibition, using a multitude of cultural reference points as well as constant references to what he understands – in a very broad sense – as modernity, in order to write his own stories. Ultimately, he makes it clear that every exhibition ultimately produces a narrative, just as exhibitions are one of the essential tools of modernity and modernism in general.

My Favorite Shop
2024

With its Cartesian, grid-like ceiling, the large hall of the late-modernist building of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark houses the 35 mm film My Favorite Shop (2024) produced by Poledna this summer in Los Angeles. Presented as an installation, the work spans several rooms of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, incorporating the institution’s architecture as an integral component. The film borrows the syntax of runway shows, the iconographic tradition of Western, religious painting and the acoustic effects of pop and club music, mutating them into a collage-like constellation that exposes the contrasts and overlaps of their specific natures.

In his work, Mathias Poledna also draws on his ongoing research into the politics of public representation, the circulation of images and collective memory. He selects motifs that are charged with both cultural and aesthetic meanings and arranges them in such a way that their specificity is initially emphasized, but ultimately collapses into a phantasmal visual world which defies any categorization. The 35 mm film is projected onto a wall specially produced for the exhibition, which runs the length of the room. In front of the wall is a bench designed by Poledna for the exhibition; the film projector is located in the neighboring smaller room.

The cinematic work is initially reminiscent of a fashion show and the elements fundamentally associated with it: a raised catwalk, stage-like lighting, femine models dressed in specially made clothes that can be read as female, music used in a targeted manner. For the soundtrack, Poledna reconfigured a psychedelic 1960s folk song recorded by a teenage sibling duo with the help of a well-known jazz producer from the Bay Area bringing it together with other elements in the form of a late 1990s edit – a dance and club music technique that decisively determines the dramaturgy of the film.

During the film’s presentation, the room is dark; and as soon as it ends, it remains light for a while. The film’s analog projector is thus fraimed by a lighting system as well as connected to the building’s electrical infrastructure –and thus integrated into the programming as a whole. In this way, the theatricality of the fashion show and the film’s performance-like character is reinforced. The tightly edited sequences show one or occasionally two models, who sometimes appear from a distance, sometimes up close and move along the catwalk in a prototypical manner. Accompanied by a mobile camera, they sometimes appear fleeting and weightless in the frame of the filmic images.

The garments worn and presented by them, specially designed for the film, are of timeless elegance and remotely reminiscent of tunics of Greek or Roman antiquity, but at the same time of uniforms coverings such as might appear, albeit aesthetically less refined, in institutions of healing or discipline. With a consistent, repeating design, this garment appears in a series of striking hues that suggest a kind of color palette or range. Eventually, however, an unexpected accessory worn by one of the models makes an unexpected appearance: a man’s severed head.

This sculpture, produced for the film by a Hollywood studio specializing in the production of hyper-realistic props, suggests historical and art-historical references, in particular to characters from antiquity and biblical stories and their pictorial representation, for example to David with the head of Goliath painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) on the threshold of the 17^th century. Iconographic references can also be made to Judith and Holofernes, who have already been depicted in numerous variations of Western works in art, music and literature, especially since the Renaissance, by artists such as Andreas Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Jan van Biljert, as well as in medieval paintings. 

In David and Goliath, the allegory is that the weaker one uses his wisdom and intellect to fight and defeat the physically stronger one in order to defeat him. Of course, it is also striking that in Poledna’s film this middle-aged man’s bearded head with long hair is carried by a much younger person who reads as female. Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612 – 1613) by the Italian artist Artemisia Gentilischi (1593 – 1654) is one of the first painterly depictions of the biblical events surrounding Judith and Holofernes explicitly from the perspective of a female gaze. Although this is a scene from the Christian tradition, art historians suspect that Gentilischi depicted herself as Judith and her mentor Agostini Tassi as Holofernes; Tassi was tried and convicted for Gentilischi’s rape.

However, the most obvious point of reference for the decapitated head in Poledna’s film is probably the iconography of St. John the Baptist, whose severed head was depicted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio at the beginning of the 17^th century and countless artists from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance through to 19^th century modernism. In addition to these painterly traditions, Poledna’s trompe‑l’oeil and realistic-looking head is also reminiscent of exhibitions of wax figures, which became particularly widespread in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and thus also of the practice of making death masks as mementos of important personalities.

Poledna emphasizes that neither memory nor history and its narration can be understood as teleological. By combining motifs from different epochs and temporalities in his work, in particular with presentations taking the form of an event such as a fashion show that can be assigned to the 20^th /21^st century, and by locating the iconography of antiquity and other cultural elements such as music of the present, he shows that discontinuity is fundamental to the construction of history.

Narratives and history are thus based on a process of radical rupture, in which images and other media are placed in different contexts and are thus completely rearranged. At the same time, however, the idea of the archive comes back into play here, as archives are of course also connected to fundamental practices of collecting and organizing, the emergence of cabinets of curiosities, botanical gardens and other collections, which emerged along with natural history in the age of classicism at the threshold of the 17^thand 18^th centuries and have been foundational ever since. According to Jacques Derrida, an archive is not only something of the past, but also fundamental for the future. In this sense, Poledna’s works also create possibilities and potential transpositions.

The severed head is a motif in many cultures, ranging from antiquity to today’s flood of images, which, standing at the intersection of violence and symbolism, evokes fascination, awe, horror and revulsion in equal measure. While the motif of a severed head was taken up in the cultural industry in the 1970s, for example in productions of European ​“director’s theater” or in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s research into the archaic as well as popular Giallo and splatter film genres, real horror videos also emerged in the 2010s, when the severed heads of people murdered by the Islamic State were often distributed in video form. Poledna’s negotiation of modernity thus also encompasses its inherent violence and the concurrent emergence of counter-modernities.

Poledna’s examination of pop-cultural phenomena drawing from art-historical references and hints to fashion and music history, as well as returning to a central theme of how modernity manifests itself again and again in an interdisciplinary manner and in the most diverse articulations. However, his new film can also be seen as a reference to the industries of art, culture, advertising and fashion, which are always on the move and directed toward the new, as well as to the structures required by art, its associated spheres and the roles that its protagonists and audiences feel assigned to. In this vein, Poledna, known for his rigorous conceptual approach, investigates his own position in a playful way, while remaining true to his own history and an expansive understanding of cultural production. Concurrently, he questions disciplinary boundaries, their oppositions and their overlaps. Isn’t a movie theater similar to an artist’s studio? How do the fashion and art worlds influence each other and how do they interact with architecture and the music industry?

Alongside his film and the installation context, in which it is presented, Poledna has also chosen to present a textile work designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1928, which he has hung in the apse, as well as a series of photographic works of origin from the context of the European automobile industry of the post-war period, which is exhibited in the basement of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark.


My Favorite Shop
Mathias Poledna, 2024
35mm color film, optical sound
10:10 min
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/​Berlin/​New York